Written by Anne Raustol – Moments before, Amos was in the john-boat with Leo and Clarence on the Forked Deer River fishing and drinking. Amos knew he sounded pitiful. On the verge of losing his farm. Crying about his wife, Sally, who never asked to be married to a drunken farmer. He didn’t have an idea of how to be much of anything else. His brothers waited for him to stop his ranting and then they started in on him without taking a break from fishing. They took turns talking. Politely giving him a what-for. “If not you, who? Who’s going to show up to your life? Who’s going to stop coming home drunk?” Leo said, casting his line in that smooth way he always did. Clarence, his other brother added cautiously and quietly, “I ain’t no saint but your farm won’t up and thrive on it’s own. Your wife wants more from you. I can tell the way she looks at you.”

Leo said, his back still turned to Amos,  “We’re your brothers. If we don’t tell you the truth, who’s gonna?” And that’s when Amos jumped. Out of a fury. Who needed the goddamn truth? The water felt cold for late summer. He swam away from the boat as fast as he could at first, then down.

Sally had dreamed of fancy things and getting off the land but she couldn’t resist Amos’s hazel eyes back in ’39 when they were 17. “I’ll love you like a queen. Better, even,” he had said, taking a break from picking cotton and lifting her up from the earth that his mamma paid for with cash. His mother ran a chicken hatchery, day and night, half the year. She had the kind of strength that filled up a room like the voice of Roosevelt coming out of the radio in the evenings. Amos would listen with his brothers and little sister, daddy and mamma sometimes, huddled close, warming each other, feeling a slippery hope.

After he and Sally started loving each other, picking cotton was almost romantic.  Teenagers believing they’d be special and do something big together. Sally would wipe her brow and talk about being an actress or a schoolteacher in the city school where she’d live down the street and walk home with her purse swinging back and forth like Jean Harlow. Amos would open his own store or get into sales or banking. “Right, Amos?” she’d say. But he knew even as he said, “Right, darling,“ and even as he pretended to want to be a city man, a man who said darling, he knew in his gut he was a land man.  But he married her and lived happily for a while. Until the spirits of who they each couldn’t be crept into their lives and haunted them. Until babies. Their first boy, born blue, injured. The second, in the shadows of the first, trying always to be heard.  His father’s death. Her mother’s. No money. A lingering depression.

Drinking was a friend. Made him forget Sally’s chestnut bob head turned away.  Or that his boy would always drag one leg behind him and his arm twisted and useless.  Just the sight of him trying so hard to keep up with other kids sometimes made Amos crave a drink or else grab his son too hard and cry into his cinnamon red hair, whispering things like you’ll be ok, you keep fighting dammit.

Drinking made him forget that he didn’t have the kind of strength that could pay cash for land or a house in the city or stand up to that small voice that whispered he was good for nothing. His wife stopped taking his shoes off gently when he’d collapse on the bed from drinking. She was strong with disappointment and restlessness. Always standing in doorways with crossed arms and furrowed brow like God angry at the Israelites.

The water seemed to invite him. As he stared into the slick blackness of the surface, he wanted to part the waters like a curtain and be on the other side into another world like his son talked about sometimes where he could actually run and be strong and normal. A fish nipped at the surface causing a ripple and it reminded Amos of hot afternoons when he was a kid. He’d run all the way from the fields on August days and he’d stop right on the bank of the river and first watch, in awe of the life above and below the waters – the little nipping fish, the dragon flies flitting around mechanically, the long-legged spiders who could walk on water. Then he’d jump wild and free into the river.

As he swam, Amos imagined Leo and Clarence, backs turned from where he jumped, still baiting their lines, still lecturing about what he should do to save his farm, his marriage, as if the slow downward spiral could be corrected in one half-drunk fishing conversation. His preacher daddy would have said get down on your knees and pray for some humility and put down the goddamned bottle. He was known to curse in the privacy of his own home. He would curse and then turn right around, put his reading glasses on, sit in his chair. Dust puffed out of the cushion when he sat down. He’d cross his legs tenderly, close his eyes for just a second, then lick a finger to find the right bible verse and read to the kids, squirming and trying to catch meaning.

The water was murky, green, lovely in its quietness. He blew out more air and reached with both hands, moving the water out of the way as he swam, so that he could get down to the very bottom. Two boulders stopped his decent. He had never seen rocks so big in the river. The space between them formed a crevice about the width of his boot.

He grabbed onto the boulders to keep his body from floating upward. Silvery fish came in and out of the crack. White underbellies and eyeballs and scales flashed in front of his face. As he continued to hold on to the rocks he lowered the rest of his body. He stuck his right foot deep into the crevice and let his grasp of the rock slip so that if his foot was too narrow he’d rise to the surface and if not, he’d let himself go, let his lungs fill with the waters of the Forked Deer River.

Even as a boy when he’d have late night conversations with his friends about how they’d all prefer to die if they had to choose, he always picked drowning. Fire, drowning, being eaten by a wild animal, falling off the Empire State Building – a popular one after King Kong was released right after he turned eleven – were always the choices.  Being under water was peaceful to him, and he often practiced holding his breath as long as he could, so he never changed his mind even when his friends would try to convince him that falling from a building would definitely be the best way to go, that it would be like flying. When he was eleven and smoking with his buddies, he never imagined that dying might seem a pleasant choice at all. He never imagined that he’d feel useless in this world.

He thought about Sally’s closed eyes as she sang at church the day before. He bowed his aching head and he wished for a clear thought, for desire, a drive forward, but he couldn’t even fake it. The sweet by and by. All kinds of voices. Some shaky, some singing from a passion he had put a lid on years ago. His wife had a deep voice like one of those jazz singers and it made him want to lift her up like the old days and take her to bed. He held her hand and squeezed  – their old private signal of affection – but there was no squeeze back. No assurance. Just a limpness in her grip that made him want to slam a door.

His mama told him once, in the kitchen after Sunday dinner, right after Sally had their second son, that she was just scared and angry because her own mama couldn’t get out of bed a lot of days. His mama and Sally’s mama grew up together and she’d watched her friend be gripped with a sadness that no one ever understood. “Be a reason to stay, Amos.  An old redwood. You hear?” she had said, holding her grandbaby like a sack of potatoes. “Now, mama,” was all Amos had said, looking down at his dirt-cracked boots.

His boot fit snug into the crevice. For a few seconds his foot stuck and he hung stagnant in the water, just as he thought he might. As his lungs burned more and more from holding his breath, he had the feeling his daddy had as he clung to Amos who sat on the edge of his bed two years ago, the day before he died. His father described the feeling like a wild second thought, a reflex of survival.

Amos jerked his leg because that panic made him want to try again to love what was his to love in this world. He pictured himself soaring to the surface, not hanging lifeless for his brothers to find. He screamed like a muted fool and thrashed his body around fighting like he’d found, all at once, some place to go and a plan how to get there.

He pushed with his other foot off the rock, hoping that the force of his other leg would do the trick. And it did. But his boot stayed behind. When he looked up, he could see the shadow of the hull. He shot up to the surface, breathed in the west Tennessee air like he’d never breathed before and pulled himself up. He clung to the side of the boat and peered into the faces of his brothers, both stripped down and ready to save him.

As he pulled his water-logged body out of the river and into the boat he thought of the first time, just a few months ago, his son, Eli, insisted on getting out of the old play washtub in the yard by himself after watching his younger brother, James, slip over the side without a care. Amos thought of how his son was silent and persistent and how Amos wanted to give him a hand but understood that this was his son’s battle. And when his boy got out, he let his body fall to a sitting position in the grass, and he laughed. He laughed like he had something funny stored up in his body for years, the way Sally cried all of sudden over burned cornbread or in the night when she would roll over and the bed would shake just slightly from her crying and Amos would lay still and pretend not to hear.

Amos couldn’t help but get caught up in Eli’s laughter that day, even though the significance was like a joke he couldn’t quite grasp but understood that it was good. Even Sally was drawn out of the house. She walked across the yard, drying her hands in her apron. She let her apron drop and put her hands on her hips as if to say, What is all this commotion?

Eli stopped laughing and looked up at Sally and said, “I did it mamma.”

“He did,” James, his younger brother echoed. “He made his leg go over without anyone helping him.”

“It was like magic, mamma,” Eli said.

“There aint no such thing, Eli,” Sally said.

Amos, dripping and trembling, smiled up at his brothers.

“What are you smiling about, Amos?” Clarence said.

”Son of a bitch. Had us thinking you drowned,” Leo said. “What were you doing for so long. I mean shit fire, Amos. You just jumped in without no warning.” His older brother put a leg up on the side of the boat and rested his elbows on his thighs and leaned into Amos’s face.

Amos had to think for a minute because the answers took time to formulate and he was practiced at not even trying to formulate. “My brain couldn’t take one more word about my farm, Sally, what I gotta do, what I gotta not do. All of it. Narrowed in on me like the goddamn humidity. But here I am. Ready to go home and fix the roof on the shed like I’ve been meaning to do. I’m ready to go home and find somebody to hug.”

Leo and Clarence looked at each other like they’d shit a biscuit and then back at Amos.

“If that’s all,” Leo said, standing up.

“Shoot,” Clarence said.

“We’ll give you a hug,” said Leo.

“I don’t need no hug from you fellas,” Amos said, picking up his hat off the floor of the boat and slapped it on his head.

Before he could say otherwise, his brothers hugged him and he hugged them back. It was one of those awkward threesome hugs that reminded him of when they were kids and they found Teddy, their mutt who followed them home from school but went missing for days and days after they’d had him for several years. When they found him, they all had a feeling like life would always be all right. The way that dog came running home to his three boys – Amos would never forget it. There would never be a greater dog even though Amos’s mamma said that old rotten dog had been gallivanting around like some sailor.  Shame on you, she had said. But Amos didn’t care. He loved that old dog.

As he walked down the gravel driveway toward his house, he smelled the air, newly cooled as from a coming storm. Sally was sitting on the rusty swing under the pecan tree. The boys were on either side of her, helping her shuck corn. He tried to think of what to tell her about being wet, though his hair had dried with the windows down in Leo’s truck, and about the missing boot.

Not wanting to appear too pathetic with an uneven gait, he took off the other boot and let it dangle behind his back as he came closer and closer to his family. The boys were the first to acknowledge him. Eli, still holding a piece of corn, scooted out of the swing and ran to him, with his usual limp and clung to Amos. He backed away and looked up at his father with a grin. “Here,” he said handing his father the corn. “See! No worms! These are bee-ut-iful,” he said imitating Amos’s good day voice.

Amos took the corn in his hands, held it like an offering and walked slowly to his wife with Eli limping along beside him.

“Where are your shoes?” Sally said, standing up and brushing her pants free of corn silks. She touched his shoulder and squeezed, a gesture that sent a wave of desire down his back. “And why are you wet, Amos?”

He hesitated, looked out over his fields and all the way to the barn that he could see through the trees along the fencerow. “I saved a drowning man in the Forked Deer River,” Amos said.

“Don’t you tell a fib,” Sally said, squaring up to her husband like she might haul off and hit him. “Why do you think you can just go off fishing with Leo and Clarence every time you get half a chance? Every time there’s something you don’t want to deal with? You could at least bring me back some fish.”

“I’m sorry, honey,” Amos said, forcing himself to keep looking her in the eye. It was so hard. Harder than most anything else in this world. So hard that he had to grit his teeth without looking mad. All he wanted to do was break her gaze and walk away and say, “Now Sally.” And then she’d say, “Don’t now Sally me.” But he’d already done that earlier in the day. It was like a drug. Walking away. Like shielding your eyes from the sun. The sun still shines when you take your hand away. So in the steady thumping of his heart he was determined to plant his two feet on the ground and move only when it was time.

“Are you hungry?” Sally asked with a familiar and mysterious affection as if she’d let her guard down and allowed herself to hope, as if the swirl of the Holy Ghost engulfed her.

“Yes,” Amos and the boys said in unison.

“Well then. Let’s go inside.”

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Anne Raustol’s stories and one essay have appeared in The Florida Review, Rock and Sling and Literary Mamma. One of her stories also won a second place prize in Glimmer Train’s short short story award.  She received her MFA in writing and literature from Bennington Writing Seminars in 2001. Currently, she is at work on a young adult novel.  She lives in Asheville  with her husband, three kids, a ball python, two clown fish, and an eager dog named Georgia.